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36JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETYto anything that happened between the initiation and the conclusion of the event.The “historical Jane” might have paused from eating the chocolates, called hermother, and then resumed eating the chocolates, but as far as the presentation ofthe event’s aspect in (2a) is concerned, this is irrelevant.On the other hand, in example (2b) the so-called imperfective aspect conveyed by“was eating” communicates a different choice in portraying the event. The Englishpast progressive form assumes that an event has begun but makes no reference toits conclusion. In the case of Jane and her box of chocolates, Jane might still beeating them now. The English progressive does not say anything about a conclusion. It leaves the event entirely open-ended. It simply describes the action as inprogress. In the linguistic literature, the terms self-contained and open-ended, used todescribe perfective and imperfective aspect, are often referred to as bounded and unbounded, respectively.6Similarly, the Greek verb can utilize perfective and imperfective aspect to describe the inner workings of an event or action as well as a third aspect to convey apast event that displays ongoing relevance. We will examine these categories ingreater depth in what follows.3. Mood. The category of mood is a little more complicated than tense and aspect. In short, verbal mood indicates a state of being or reality, whether actual,probable, permissible, or possible. As our concern here is primarily focused on thedistinction between tense and aspect, we note only a few illustrative examples. InEnglish, mood is often expressed through auxiliary or helping verbs. 7 Considerexample 3:3a. Actuality:3b. Probability:3c. Permission:3d. Ability:He landed at Heathrow rather late.She might arrive home by dinner if traffic is good.You may substitute asparagus for the baked potato.He can type 50 words per minute.English auxiliary verbs can express additional modal functions such as possibility, necessity, and obligation. For our current purposes, note that mood functions in a language to express a range of possibilities, whether a factual (i.e. realis)event or situation or an extrafactual (i.e. irrealis) one. The irrealis category can express a possibility (“might,” “could”) or an obligation (“should,” “must”). Greekhas four moods: indicative (a realis mood used for statements/questions), the irrealisimperative (used for commands), and subjunctive and optative moods (which alsoexpress irrealis events involving probable, possible, and/or desired events or situations).Bernard Comrie, Aspect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 3–4.These are often called helping verbs in primary and secondary English grammar texts, but referencegrammars prefer the term auxiliary. For a student-oriented discussion of mood in English, see RodneyHuddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, A Student’s Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005), 53–56.67

THE GREEK VERBAL SYSTEM AND ASPECTUAL PROMINENCE37III. PROMINENCE WITHIN VERBS:CROSS-LINGUISTIC CRITERIA AND IMPLICATIONSAs already noted, languages have a tendency to give greater prominence totense, aspect, or mood. In what follows, we will consider criteria for determiningwhether a language gives prominence to tense, aspect, or mood and we will conclude that, although English is tense-prominent, Greek is aspect-prominent.Before we examine what grammatical prominence means, it is important toemphasize what it does not mean. It does not mean that the prominent category(whether tense, aspect, or mood) is dominant to the exclusion of the other two categories. It also does not mean that one category is more important than the othertwo, or that the other two become irrelevant. That is not how grammatical prominence works. Rather, grammatical prominence involves the extent to which one ofthese categories provides the primary or central concept for how a particular verbalsystem is arranged. The prominent category functions as a sort of organizing principle for the other two categories. For example, there is a close relationship between tense and mood: because mood deals closely with the certainty of an event, itshould not be surprising that there are correlations between a clause referring tothe past (tense) and that clause also being more certain in its existence (mood). Inother words, if something has already happened, it is pretty certain! The same canbe said of a future event (tense) being less certain (mood) since a future event hasnot yet happened. Similarly, a completed (and thus “bounded”) event (aspect) ismore real (mood) than an incomplete event. D. N. S. Bhat shows how these threecategories provide an interconnected system for organizing language and for assigning verbal prominence to one of these categories.8 Visually, we could representthis typology of possible verbal prominence in languages as a triangle, with tense,aspect, and mood each representing a corner.8D. N. S. Bhat, Prominence, 93–94.

38JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETYBhat’s typology of language types91. Criteria. So what criteria do linguists use when classifying a language astense-prominent, aspect-prominent, or mood-prominent? Most of these criteriainvolve the structure and grammatical forms of the language.a. First criterion: Extent of morphological encoding within the language. The first criterion is the extent to which the category is grammaticalized within a languagethrough morphological encoding. To properly understand this criterion, we mustmake a distinction between grammatical meaning and lexical meaning. In the Englishclause “I wanted a new hat,” the verb “wanted” denotes the lexical meaning of“desire,” but the suffix attached to the end of “wanted” denotes past tense. Thusthe -ed suffix encodes grammatical meaning. One can assess whether a language givesgreater prominence to tense, aspect, or mood by observing which of these threehas the greatest extent of grammatical encoding within a language’s verbal system.b. Second criterion: The formation of a complete paradigm. The second criterion is thedegree to which tense, aspect, or mood forms a complete grammaticalized paradigm. In English, we use suffixes such as -s or -ed to grammaticalize tense (thusjumps is present but jumped is past). This will be more fully illustrated in what follows.c. Third and fourth criteria: Pervasive and obligatory. Finally, the third and fourthcriteria for verbal prominence are whether the category is pervasive and obligatory,respectively, across the various forms within the verbal system. We will see belowhow aspect is the category that is most pervasive in Greek across all six major verbtypes. Tense only occurs in the indicative mood. Mood is present in many verbtypes (i.e. indicative, subjunctive, imperative, and optative). Aspect, however, iscentral to all Greek verbs.9 Adapted from Michael Aubrey, “The Greek Perfect and the Categorization of Tense and Aspect”(M.A. thesis, Trinity Western University, 2014), 137.

THE GREEK VERBAL SYSTEM AND ASPECTUAL PROMINENCE392. Implications. When a language structurally aligns itself with either tense, aspect, or mood against the other two, there are a number of correlative implications.10 Three of the most important can be summarized as follows: The prominent category becomes especially apparent outside the indicative mood since the two non-prominent categories tend to recede outsidethe indicative. As a result, the non-indicative verb forms provide a litmustest for verbal prominence. Less prominent grammatical categories become associated with the prominent category, with many languages tending to use the prominent category to help express the less prominent categories.11 The prominent category will tend to be encoded through morphologicalinflection, while the less prominent categories will tend to be encoded byless direct means (e.g. through the use of auxiliary verbs).With the above descriptors of verbal prominence in mind, let us examineboth English and Greek with an eye toward their respective prominent verbal categories.IV. TENSE PROMINENCE OF ENGLISH VERBSEnglish is widely considered to be a tense-prominent language. In English,past tense is grammaticalized in many verbal forms using the suffix -ed. Indeed,tense is the primary category grammaticalized in English verbs, and accordinglylinguists widely describe English as a tense-prominent language.12 The English verb,unlike Greek, inherently involves very little explicit verbal morphology. In otherwords, English verbs tend to be fairly static in their forms, with only the addition ofsimple changes such as an s or an ing to distinguish forms. However, when Englishdoes utilize morphological changes, these changes tend to encode tense.Type of Grammatical Form1st&2ndPresent FormPast Tense FormPast Participle FormPresent Participle alkedwalkingsangsungsingingIn terms of our three categories (tense, aspect, and mood) it becomes clearquite quickly that English explicitly grammaticalizes only the tense category withinits verbs. The other two categories, aspect and mood, are expressed with the use ofhelping words (e.g. where mood may use “should give,” “could walk,” “mightSee a full examination in Bhat, Prominence, 101–2.In Greek, this is particularly the case with respect to the way future time reference and habitualitybecome interrelated with aspect.12 E.g., Adeline Patard and Frank Brisard, eds., Cognitive Approaches to Tense, Aspect, and Epistemic Modality (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), esp. pp. 217–248; cf. Bhat, Prominence, 120. The same couldbe said for German and other Austro-Asiatic languages.1011

40JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETYsing,” etc.) or are communicated through a tense form. For example, English tendsto communicate aspect with a helping word rather than with a uniquely aspectualmarker, as noted in example 4 below:4a. Progressive aspect:4b. Perfective aspect:John was giving Sally an apple.John gave Sally an apple.Note how tense markers are the primary grammaticalized features withinthese verbal forms. The progressive aspect in clause (a) is formed by using a helping verb, while the perfective aspect in clause (b) is expressed by the past tenseform “gave.” In both instances, English aspect is communicated using English tensemorphology, although with progressive aspect a helping word is also used. As Bhatpredicts, we can see that the tense-prominent features of English, as well as itshelping words, are used to convey the less prominent aspectual distinction. Wecould make similar observations about the English category of mood, where thevarious moods are expressed by means of helping words like can and could, shall andshould, will and would, may and might. Similar to aspect, mood is not grammaticalizedin the English verb itself.Now, since the object of this investigation is the Greek verb, let us ask theobvious operative question: is Greek, like English, a tense-prominent language? Tothis question, we answer a hearty “No!” Greek is not a tense-prominent language,either in its semantics or its structure. To argue this point, we will now turn to afuller examination of these principles with respect to Greek.V. ASPECT PROMINENCE OF GREEK VERBSUnlike English, with its tense prominence, some other languages will primarily grammaticalize mood (e.g. the Papuan language Amele and the Tibeto-Burmanlanguages of Nepal). Still other languages will primarily grammaticalize aspect (e.g.Greek and other Indo-Aryan languages). In what follows, we will examine howGreek manifests its aspect prominence in its morphology. We further argue thatthis aspect prominence should be reflected in how we describe and conceive ofGreek, particularly with respect to the descriptive labels we use in our teaching andexegesis.The aspect-prominent nature of Greek is encoded within its morphologicalstructure (as we will see below), and this structure reveals the presence of threeaspects: perfective aspect, imperfective aspect, and what we describe as“combinative” aspect (due to its combination of morphology and semantics fromthe other two aspects) but which might more traditionally be described as perfectaspect (or even “stative,” if properly defined).How, then, are these aspectual categories communicated in the Greek verbalsystem? As noted above, one criterion of verbal prominence is the degree to whichtense, aspect, or mood forms a complete paradigm. Let us now turn to how tense,aspect, and mood are grammaticalized in the Greek morphological system.

THE GREEK VERBAL SYSTEM AND ASPECTUAL PROMINENCE411. Morphological overview of active verbs. In parsing the structure of the Greek verb,we analyze the Greek paradigm from the inside out. We begin with the lexical coreof the verb. This is the most basic element of any verb. It is what makes that verbdistinct in the lexicon from other verbs.13 Some examples of lexical cores are presented below.“loosen, destroy, release”“call”“love”“reveal, make known”λυκαλεαγαπαφανερο-None of these lexical cores will ever appear in the text by itself. They needsome inflectional morphology before they can be used in a sentence.The lexical core primarily requires some kind of morphological marker foraspect, its most prominent grammatical feature. The morphologizing of aspect thusforms the Greek verb’s structural backbone. In Table 1 below, note how aspectmorphology attaches directly to the lexical core. In other words, the morphologicalfeatures that express aspect appear either immediately before or after the lexicalcore. Another observation that has emerged from our work is that the aspect markers that are prefixed to the lexical core always encode imperfective aspect while thosethat are suffixed to the lexical core always encode perfective aspect. This combination of the lexical core and the aspect markers (whether imperfective aspect prefixes or perfective aspect suffixes) forms the aspect stem. The aspect stem of any Greekverb comprises its most basic grammaticalized feature.Table 1: Overview of Morphological Features of Greek VerbsTense Indicator(indicative only)ImperfectiveAspect PrefixAspect StemLexical CorePerfectiveAspect SuffixPersonalEndingsCross-linguistically, verbal prominence tends to move from the inside out,with the more prominent, more foundational, and generally less static elementslocated closer to the lexical core, and the less prominent and more variable elements located on the periphery of the verbal form. This feature of verbal prominence correlates to the placement of aspect indicators, modal indicators, the temporal indicator, and personal endings, as we will discuss below.14Greek verbs are therefore comprised of three basic aspect stems: the perfective, imperfective, and combinative. You should note here that we are scuttling the13 In linguistics this would be called the verbal root. However, the term root in discussion of AncientGreek usually refers to historical reconstructions of the proto-language. In order to avoid confusion onthat point, we use the term lexical core.14 See here Joan L. Bybee, Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form (Amsterdam:John Benjamins, 1985), e.g., p. 22; also Bhat, Prominence, 155.

42JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETYmore traditional language of tense stems in favor of aspect stems, thus reinforcing theaspect prominence of Greek with the labels that we apply to it.Table 2 shows an analysis of the tense, aspect, and mood markers for threedifferent (first singular) indicative forms of the Greek verb with the root δω: δίδωμι(“I am giving”), ἔδωκα (“I gave”), and δέδωκα (“I have given”). Because tense ispresent in the indicative mood alongside aspect (and only in the indicative mood!),we identify both aspect and tense in the left-hand labels below.Table 2: Tense and Aspect Morphology in Indicative Forms of ΔίδωμιImperfectiveAspect/Non-past TensePerfectiveAspect/Past TenseCombinativeAspect/Non-past TenseTenseIndicatorImperfectiveAspect PrefixLexicalCorePerfectiveAspect δεδωκαIn Table 2 above, we can observe how Greek grammaticalizes tense, aspect,and lexeme, as well as a number of other features. Consider the first form, δίδωμι;morphologically, this indicative form lacks the past-tense marker, and is thereforenon-past (specifically, the present tense). It is unbounded/imperfective in aspect(“am giving”), utilizing an imperfective aspect prefix (the reduplication δι). In contrast, the form ἔδωκα is past tense (which the ε augment marks). It is also bounded/perfective in aspect (“gave”), as expressed by a perfective aspect suffix (κ). Finally, the form δέδωκα is also non-past, as is indicated by the absence of the pasttense augment. Aspectually, δέδωκα is more complex since it has both an imperfective aspect prefix (δε) and a perfective aspect suffix (κ). One might question whywe view the reduplicated δι and δε as well as the κ as markers of aspect rather thanmarkers of tense—indeed, the suffix κ (and the σ in aorist and future forms) isoften referred to as a “tense formative.”15 Although this should become clearer aswe move forward, we will note here that it is the augment that is absent in the nonindicative paradigms (where tense is absent), not the reduplication or κ/σ suffixes.Thus we argue that it is the augment that expresses tense, not the other features(which instead express aspect). If the above analysis is correct, we can observe herethat Greek has a systematic approach to morphologizing both tense and aspect inthe indicative mood.16So, e.g., William D. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 356.Although we have used δίδωμι as our example here, these principles apply not only to μιconjugation verbs but also to ω-conjugation verbs. Nevertheless, the encoding of imperfective aspect ismore explicit in μι-conjugation verbs since reduplication appears in both the imperfective and combina1516

THE GREEK VERBAL SYSTEM AND ASPECTUAL PROMINENCE43Outside of the indicative mood, the grammaticalization of aspect withinGreek forms becomes even clearer. Particularly relevant here are Bhat’s third andfourth criteria, which state that the prominent verbal category will be both pervasive and obligatory. When we move into the Greek subjunctive, imperative, andoptative moods, as well as the Greek infinitive and participle forms, we find thataspect is pervasively grammaticalized across these forms. In other words, aspectappears in all Greek verbs and is thus both pervasive and obligatory. Tense, on theother hand, only appears in the indicative mood.17Table 3 below provides representative examples from the non-indicativemoods as well as from infinitives and participles. For the ω-conjugation verb λύω,note how the perfective aspect stem is the lexical core perfective suffix σ; theimperfective aspect stem is the lexical core alone (though we noted that the μιconjugation paradigm uses reduplication to encode imperfective aspect); and thecombinative aspect stem is an imperfective reduplicated prefix lexical core aperfective κ suffix.18Table 3: Aspect as Pervasive and Obligatory in GreekActive λύκαμενAspect is pervasive across the entire Greek verbal system, and it is also theonly grammatical category of the three that is always completely obligatory. Incomparison, mood is not expressed at all with infinitives and participles, and thepast/non-past distinction expressed by the Greek augment prefix disappears entirely outside of the indicative mood.tive forms in these forms, while in ω-conjugation verbs reduplication appears only in combinative forms.Verbs in the ω-conjugation use the bare lexical core to express imperfective aspect (i.e. imperfectiveaspect functions as a morphologically default form).17 Mood in Greek, like tense, is also represented in a more limited fashion than aspect.18 Note that the perfect subjunctive and optative do not appear with a distinct grammaticalizedform, but are formed periphrastically.

44JOURNAL OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETYIn all of this, Greek’s aspect-prominent features stand in contrast to English’stense-prominent features. Aspect is more grammaticalized, more paradigmatic,more obligatory, and more pervasive than tense

THE GREEK VERBAL SYSTEM AND ASPECTUAL PROMINENCE: REVISING OUR TAXONOMY AND NOMENCLATURE NICHOLAS J. ELLIS, MICHAEL G. AUBREY, AND MARK DUBIS* Abstract: Verbal systems can give prominence to tense, aspect, or mood. The morphology of the verbal system within biblical Greek provides important evidence to suggest that Greek is an